


Insert 25 Cents to Continue

by Etanseline



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Community: hc_bingo, Dream Bubbles, Gen, POV Second Person, Trope Bingo Round 1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-14
Updated: 2013-05-14
Packaged: 2017-12-11 21:34:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/803493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Etanseline/pseuds/Etanseline
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's no point, but you pick up your controller, hit start.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Insert 25 Cents to Continue

**Author's Note:**

> Written for hc_bingo, prompt "captivity", and trope_bingo, prompt "game night".
> 
> Large chunks of this story have been sitting around unfinished for (literal) years on my desktop, which is terrible, but not terribly surprising.

Tavros sort of shrugs, but he's not really paying attention to where you're trying to lead the conversation, too focused on trying not to get his player stuck in some glitched-out corner of the skating arena. Pointless, considering that the entire arena is one big glitchy clusterfuck. "It's, okay, I guess. I probably would have been culled, anyway."

Your hands freeze on the game controls; it makes no difference, because your player is frozen, stuck doing loops around a grind bar that send his head slicing through virtual concrete with every revolution. _Culled_. Trolls have gross terminology for just about everything. The word itself gives you a kind of vague idea of the particulars; you try not to think about it.

Your body knows better: chill in your veins, sick bile in your throat, breathing like you know your breaths are numbered. Which is ironic to the max, because as far as you can tell, you're in it to win it with this bubble, eternity or bust.

Tavros eventually succumbs to the inevitable: his skateboarder gets stuck in a looping mid-air thrust and his polygons start tripping balls from one end of the screen to the other. He drops back onto the couch with a groan. It takes him a while to look at you, grinning the grin of the brotherhood of mutually-defeated-by-shitty-game.

Somehow you don't manage to pull yourself together in spite of all that extra time.

His grin sparks out and drops.

You're cool. Just two bros hanging out in doomed eternity. You're cool.

Tavros stares at you for a while, face like the fleshy equivalent of blue-screen-of-death mode, but he still manages to hard reset and get his act together before you do. "Do you, want to play again?"

There's no point, but you pick up your controller, hit start.

*

"I, uh," Tavros says. He draws the _uh_ out to infinity and beyond and it still doesn't give him enough stalling time to think of an answer, so you sit there and watch him take the stalling up a notch from behind your shades: face scrunched up in concentration, metaphorical gears clicking around so fast that you can almost see sparks, doofy teeth worrying at his horrorshow mouth. "Well, it's, not really important, I guess. It happened. I can't, go back and, uh, make it _not_ happen."

But it matters. It matters, because the loser troll is beating you at your own game of not caring, because you kind of can't deal with being trapped like this. And the more you pretend you can, the more your roommate seems to pick up on how okay you aren't, makes shit hella awkward in the process.

The way you figure, his life must've been pretty shitty for him to enjoy not-quite-death this much.

You tell him so.

Finally he spills his story: a lot of stuff you don't care about, but then his broken legs, getting cut in half at the waist, last surviving members of the species, and so on. His tone stays casual throughout, like you're acquaintances, chatting about the weather, keeping it light. After that he switches to his hobbies and talks about them for easily four times as long before you interrupt. Fucking trolls. You're not even surprised.

You joke about contributing an infinite amount of shitty raps to a dream-world that's bound to pop and take all of your shitty raps with it. Anything to fill the silence. You can't breathe.

Tavros smiles his nightmare smile. "It's not, so bad here," he says, almost shy.

He reacts badly to your reaction. You can't imagine what your face must look like; you don't really know how you feel, but whatever it is, it makes Tavros fuck off to the opposite end of the apartment, a palpable barrier of awkward between you.

*

You spend what might be an afternoon avoiding each other, but it's more like a remembered afternoon, the kind from your childhood that seemed to stretch on forever, translated into literal form courtesy of your own personal hellbubble. Chilling on opposite ends of the apartment. Pointedly not dealing with each other. Thoughts looping on endless repeat.

You'll go crazy long before you ever get out, or stop caring, or whatever.

*

Later (but not much), you catch Tavros wandering around, happy in an inward kind of way. He looks like he's exercising, walking from one end of the room to the other in varied strides, and you can't find it in you to make fun of him, not even when he starts running around and tripping over your shit like the little wrecking ball that could.

Later (much), Tavros returns from who knows where - you didn't notice him leave - with some kind of freaky alien monster on his heels. The second time he returns with three. It sounds like he's breeding an alien army in your kitchen. You shut the bedroom door when he starts rapping what sounds suspiciously like a lullaby.

At some point the noises stop and curiosity gets the better of you. Your kitchen definitely looks like the aftermath of an alien breeding program.

You find Tavros on the roof, riding one of the four horses of the horrorterror apocalypse, waving a lance around like a pro and scaring the shit out of every bird on your building and all of its neighbours with his unholy army of mutant fiends. And, well, you've seen weirder things, but that doesn't make this any less weird. He seems to be having fun, with or without your company.

The longer you spend in this bubble, the less you get his deal.

Whatever it is, though, it makes you feel better in spite of yourself.

*

"Would you like to, uh, learn how to play?"

Tavros is sprawled out on the carpet on a bed of terrifying monsters: one hand patting the muzzle of his creepy purple horse while he whispers sweet nothings to usher it off to, fuck, monster dreamworld, monster afterlife, something comparatively awful. With the other he arranges a stack of cards between you and manages to look offensively normal, insofar as an alien with a candycorn bull-rack can look like a teenage boy who communicates his feelings through games, which is something you recognize in spite of all the weird packaging.

There's no point.

You sit down across from him anyway, and you start a new game.


End file.
